10 December, 2012

Bad Vision #1

Don't know exactly why, but this puzzle took me almost three minutes to solve.

Usually its less than a minute for this type and level in CTB, but I became fixated on NxB as  part of the solution, and kept trying to make it work.

Once I moved away from that thought, the answer was very quick.

Possibly this was because I had spent the previous 30 minutes on Knight mates and tactics.

Two lessons learned.


White to move and Gain a Rook

3 comments:

Signalman said...

The solution is Qe6, with a forked double-threat of mate or win a rook.

AoxomoxoA wondering said...

My first question to a puzzle is: Is it about mate, promotion or material.
if you start thinking about mate then g7 becomes very interesting.

A second good question is: which piece is not overprotected. The count at the rook c7 is 0. This makes the rook to a possibly target of a tactic.
After these both questions the solution is not that hard anymore ( still you always have to find it )

Signalman said...

Hi AoxomoxoA.

"still you always have to find it"...very true, but some systematic process is always useful !

I did solve it eventually, but as mentioned, I had a single track with all the knight puzzles I'd been doing.

This is an issue with carrying out puzzles based on a single theme, I think, although they are useful to cement some ideas.